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A bill aimed at strengthening the state’s Open Meetings Act came close to final passage Wednesday after a House committee gave its approval.

Sponsored by Sen. Cam Ward, R-Alabaster, the legislation aims to address recent Alabama Supreme Court rulings that critics said gutted the law. The bill passed the Senate on March 18.

The House Ethics and Campaign Finance committee approved the changes on a voice vote Wednesdsay morning.

The legislation specifically targets three Supreme Court rulings. In 2012, the state’s high court ruled that “meeting,” as defined in the act, only covered public bodies where a majority of members were present. The court according ruled that members of the Montgomery County Board of Education did not violate the law when members met in groups of two or three with then-superintendent Barbara Thompson to hear her plans and goals outside a public meeting.

The Board of Education would also hold back-to-back meetings where a majority of members – but no more than three at a time – attended. The Supreme Court ruled the law lacked language making such “serial meetings” illegal.

The following year, the high court ruled that two former Alabama Public Television employees, who said they were fired during a secret meeting of the governing board of the body, did not have standing to sue. The plaintiffs lacked standing, the court said, because the act assigned any damages from a successful prosecution to the state, not the individuals.

In another 2013 case addressing the chaotic passage of the Alabama Accountability Act that the Alabama Constitution “does not require the Legislature to conduct its meetings in public,” despite Section 57 of the state constitution requiring the doors of the chamber to remain open.

The bill would provide standing to citizens to sue, ban serial meetings and clarifies the definition of a meeting.

The committee approved both a House and Senate version of the legislation; both bills are identical. The House version would still need to pass both chambers; the Senate bill, if it passed the House, would need the concurencce of the upper chamber.